Why my VSTO Outlook add-in works in Dev box, not in non-dev or production boxes?

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Recently one of my customer reported (we used to see this is many of the developer have is that their assembly does not execute as expected in non-development boxes – why it so?) that initially they tried they created VSTO Outlook Add-in project solution with the helps of Visual Studio 2005. But  when they move it to another machine it fails to load.

In these type of general troubleshooting steps, you can check couple of relevant things, as i found in the blogpost:

  1. Network rule is correct – Don’t assume, https://server/ –> FullTrust –> always added to the MyComputer zone. It's in  LocalIntranet
  2. Errorneous URL – Typo/Error in the filename or URL
  3. Asterisk (*) was not added - After a directory to indicate "and all folders under here"

Later i jumped into the analysis & debugging part i noticed that that policy was not updated correctly. To rectify that i tried the following:

caspol -all -lg

caspol -rsg path_to_assembly

i) the security policy looks like, lg –> list groups & all policy rules
ii) then CLR thinks the evidence of the assembly maps to those rules like, rsg –> resolve groups & list groups the assembly matches.

Certainly this will tell us whether the customer have set up policy correctly or not. Also this will help us to identify their assembly is matching the code groups, should match or not.

Happy VSTO troubleshooting!!